Metalinguistic denial and its felicity conditions

Date

2021

Journal Title

Journal ISSN

Volume Title

Publisher

Tartu Ülikool

Abstract

In the literature on denial, not much attention has been paid to metalinguistic denial, a speech act used to object to metalinguistic information in a conversation. The purposes of this paper are to describe the effects of a metalinguistic denial in a Stalnakerian framework of conversations and to determine the felicity conditions of metalinguistic denial. To fulfil the first purpose, I propose to represent in the framework used metalinguistic information as “metalinguistic propositions”. Each metalinguistic proposition encodes a criterion used to determine the meaning of an expression in a conversation. These are the entities a metalinguistic denial objects to. After introducing metalinguistic propositions, I model the effects of metalinguistic denial on a conversation. To fulfil the second purpose, we need to represent why, in some cases, a metalinguistic denial needs to be followed by an explanation to be felicitous. In order to do so, I argue we have to introduce propositions that speakers acknowledge as possible points of disagreement in the conversation. I call these propositions “contestable metalinguistic propositions”. I argue that if speakers cannot figure out which contestable metalinguistic propositions are being denied by a metalinguistic denial, an explanation has to follow the denial.

Description

Keywords

philosophy, philosophy of language

Citation